I Lost 320 Pounds Riding a Bike

Late one afternoon in 2002, Scott Cutshall's Grand Am rolled toward the leafy Jersey City, New Jersey, neighborhood where he, his wife and their daughter lived on the ground floor of a brownstone apartment.

The car was silent, except for a quiet refrain. "I'm a dead man," the 38-year-old Cutshall said. "I'm a dead man."

In the driver's seat sat his wife, Amy, who had asked him to see a doctor about his weight, which then hovered at 427 pounds, and would later top out at 501. In back sat three-year-old Chloe, who Cutshall cared for as best he could given how little he could move.

The news was not good. The doctor gave him six months to live without bariatric surgery. With it, the doctor said, Cutshall had a 50 percent chance of making it out of the operating room.

Over the next few years, even as he defied that dire prediction, every doctor, every authority he consulted would give him equally urgent warnings. Everyone told him the same thing: Lose weight or die. At the doctor's office that day in 2002, Cutshall had voiced the foremost question in his mind.

Cutshall had known despair before this—especially during one bad patch, when Amy had grown so frustrated at his refusal to undergo surgery that she'd taken Chloe and left. For good? For a little while? He didn't know. But while she was gone, Cutshall had followed the only path he could see out. He'd gone into the bathroom with a box cutter and carved open his wrists.

Then he'd waited. He had waited for the struggle, for the hopelessness to slip away.

But they hadn't. They were still there. He was still there. So he cut deeper. It had hurt more, but still, nothing had happened. Later the doctors would tell him that because he was so obese, his blood kept clotting and pooling inside his wrists. Being fat had saved his life...for a while.

Now, as the car stopped outside his apartment, Cutshall opened the door and reached for the ground with his foot. He pushed off the steering wheel to get himself out, but the column cracked loose under his weight. Somehow, he managed to exit and lumber up the front stairs. There, he settled back into the deep hole he'd dug for himself.

As he sat there with his family, Amy told him something he would never hear from anyone else.

"I think you can do it yourself," she said. "But you have to want to." Cutshall was always fat; it runs in his family. Growing up in Meadville, Pennsylvania, he and his older brother blew up right around puberty, no matter how much they ran, how fast they swam, or how hard they rode their bikes. Their swim coach called them Gut and Minigut.

Rick Cogley met Cutshall when he came to Meadville to attend Allegheny College in 1982. He remembers Cutshall for his charisma, energy and caustic humor. "He would just talk your head off," says Cogley. "He's into avant-garde jazz, which is a free- flowing jazz idiom, and it really suits his personality, because he's like that when he talks." Cogley also remembers how they'd get together and eat like it was an event. "One of the things we used to say to each other was, 'Hey, let's "pact" the pizza.' And we would go find a lot of food and just eat all of it."

When college didn't flow enough for Cutshall, he dropped out during his senior year to tour with a band before setting off for New York City, where he spent the next 14 years playing the kind of obscure music that promises small venues and empty seats. Hauling his drums up and down Manhattan seemed to keep his weight in check.

One night while taking a break from playing to a half-empty room, he sat next to a cute, round-faced girl from Michigan. "He was really funny and smart," Amy remembers now, "and we just hit it off. But it seemed like we would just be friends."

Afterward they said good-bye and exchanged e-mail addresses.

They stayed in touch. Their connection felt so natural and right that three months later, Cutshall traveled to Flint, Michigan, for a visit. Once he spent some time there, he decided to stay.

The couple married in 1998 in Michigan. But there wasn't much of a jazz scene in Flint, and soon Cutshall was at loose ends. After a year in the Rust Belt, they moved to New Jersey to start a family. Amy worked as a nurse while Cutshall stayed home with the baby.

He weighed about 300 pounds when Chloe was born in 1999. Then he started packing on serious weight. He rarely ate fast food, preferring Thai, Vietnamese and Middle Eastern. But he ate a lot of it. By mid-2001, his weight had climbed to 380. In 2004, two years after that fateful visit when the physician predicted Cutshall's imminent demise, he hit 470, and by his last doctor's visit in 2005, he tipped the scales at 501.

With every extra pound, Cutshall's mobility decreased; he could walk only 10 steps before needing to rest. He left the apartment just two or three times a year, and then only to sit on the stoop. When Amy took Chloe to the park she reported back to him via cell phone, sending pictures of his daughter playing in the sun. Doctors warned him he was inching closer to dying.

Sometimes before she left for work, Amy would help her husband move to the window so he could observe the world while she wasn't there to tell him about it. On one of these days, he saw a man ride a bike past their house. The average-looking middle-aged guy rode a touring bike with two panniers. He wove through traffic as if he were a fish swimming up a stream, slipping past boulders and rocks with grace and ease. "I remember," says Cutshall, "he had the biggest smile on his face."

As Cutshall watched, he thought of Meadville. He remembered the feeling of riding his own bike—the movement, the freedom, the wind. He hadn't felt them for so long, but he almost could again. It hit him like a new kind of hunger.

That same day, Cutshall spent several hours researching bikes online and wondering if maybe he could ride one. He ordered catalogs and back issues of old cycling magazines.

The next day—and the day after that, and every day after that— Amy helped him over to the window to look for the cyclist. Cutshall started buying bikes. He found a classic, fully lugged '70s Trek touring bike on Craigslist, but it flexed under him as if made of rubber. Then he tried a Rivendell, thinking it would prove sturdier. He and Amy and Chloe took the bike outside. Two times, he got on and rode a little way down the street. But when he pushed down on the pedals, the bottom bracket torqued out the opposite direction, as if trying to escape what was being asked of it.

So Cutshall began contacting frame builders to see if they could make him a bike strong enough to support his weight. The responses trickled in. A few called Cutshall a disgrace. Others took him more seriously, but said they couldn't do anything soon.

"I needed it quick," Cutshall says. "I needed it to save my life."

Bob Brown, a part-time bike builder from Minnesota, happened to be at a low point in his queue. "Honestly, I didn't take it real seriously," Brown says. "I've had plenty of people claim to want to get back in shape and change their lives, but they didn't follow through on it. So I responded and said I'd be willing to talk to him about it, but I really never thought I'd hear back from him."

Five days later, the two settled on a frame and a price. Brown, who would be traveling to New York for his other job as a design engineer, agreed to stop by and take some measurements.

"Scott made dinner for me the first night," Brown recalls. "He couldn't stand up for more than a minute before his legs were exhausted. He cooked dinner, but he sat at the stove and asked me to get ingredients for him. I remember thinking: Wow, I can't imagine living this guy's life."

Three months after Brown's visit, in early 2005, he flew back into town with Cutshall's new ride, a mono-grammed blue-and-white, steel-framed cycle with tandem-strength wheels and a fork that took Brown as long to build as the entire rest of the bike. It was, he says, at least five times stronger than it needed to be.

Cutshall loved it. He fantasized about it. He gazed at it. He did everything except ride it, because he was sure he'd break it. After he'd let it sit in the hallway for nearly two months, Amy called Brown and reported that the bike was sitting idle, gathering dust.

"Bob called me," Cutshall says, "and he just dressed my ass down. He said, 'There's not one thing on that bike you can break that I can't fix, so get out there and ride.'"

Even then, Cutshall wasn't ready. "This still seems like a dead end," he told Amy. "If we keep eating the way we're eating, no amount of riding is going to make any difference."

So his new bike waited for months while he read books, while he tried different diets, while he went to the doctor for the last time. It waited while his weight climbed higher.

On Thanksgiving Day 2005, Cutshall cooked his family's traditional meal, and laid it out for Amy and Chloe: mashed potatoes, candied yams, sauteed green beans, the family stuffing recipe and a 14-pound turkey.

But as they were about to eat, he looked at the food in front of him and had a kind of vision. It was a fully formed menu that covered all his daily nutritional needs, offered many of his favorite flavors and totaled about 1,100 calories: one bowl of vegan soup, one hummus wrap, a bowl of pasta, one to two pounds of vegetables and a glass of wine.

"I said to Amy and Chloe, 'Here's what I'm going to eat, and I'm going to ride my bike, and you don't have to do it,'" Cutshall says. They said they were in.

Cutshall took a spoonful of each Thanksgiving food and ate two small pieces of turkey. When they finished, they put all the leftovers into a garbage bag, took it outside and threw it away.

After dinner, with Amy and Chloe's help, Cutshall brought his new bike down to the street. He hoisted his leg over the seat, put his feet on the pedals and started rolling down the road. Slowly, deliberately, he rounded the block once, then stopped to rest on the curb. He went around again, then rested. Another block. Rest.

By the end of the night, he'd logged 1.9 miles in more than three hours. His knees ached and his crotch burned. He lost all feeling in his hands, and his lungs were on fire. He felt better than he could ever remember feeling.

"Every time I rode the bike a mile," Cutshall says, "it left me feeling physically like shit." If you had looked at him, you would still have said he was a dangerously overweight man. But mentally and psychologically, he was transformed.

He rode every day.

He rode through the pain, past the taunts and the kids who threw Coke bottles at his head and yelled, "Fat ass!" Every night, no matter what the weather, he rode. After a month, his cycle computer hit 3 miles on a single ride for the first time. When he told Amy, she cried.

Soon he was up to 5 miles, riding past the nearby warehouses. Then he rode a 10-mile loop to Hoboken. Then 20 miles to Ellis Island and past the Statue of Liberty, glowing in the night. He rode in physical pain, but emotional bliss. And each time he got back home, he made himself ride one mile more.

As Cutshall's miles climbed, his weight finally started to drop. For the first few months he had no idea how much, because his digital scale maxed out at 440 pounds. Every six weeks he would step on the scale, and it would read blank.

Then, on March 30, 2006, numbers appeared: 424.8 pounds. That year, he would bike a total of 1,932 miles and shed more than 160 pounds, bringing his weight down to 338 pounds by December.

Meanwhile, Cutshall and Bob Brown stayed in touch. Once, when Brown came for a visit, he mentioned all the great biking beyond the borders of Jersey City. Though it was just an offhand comment, Cutshall started thinking about what Brown had said. Exploring his world by bicycle made it seem smaller, and New Jersey had begun to feel cramped and boring. After some discussion, he and Amy decided to find a new place to live their new life.

Brown convinced them to try Minneapolis. They packed up their car and drove out to the Twin Cities in spring 2007. The family quickly became a fixture on the local cycling scene, showing up at group rides and cycling parties and hanging out at bike-friendly coffee shops.

"He walked in here with Bob Brown one evening," says Hurl Everstone, owner of the Cars-R-Coffins coffee and bike shop. "I just thought he was another dude who was way into bikes."

The scene in the Twin Cities was all the Cutshalls had hoped for, and they rode everywhere, putting only 300 miles on their car in a year and a half.

Despite being a known quantity all over town, and despite having a few friends who checked his blog, Large Fella on a Bike, few people knew just how far Cutshall had ridden until about nine months after they arrived, when an article about him appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Traffic on his blog spiked and he began to garner a sometimes-unwanted celebrity status. Strangers would stop him on the street and say, "Hey, you're the Large Fella!" Television producers called asking about interviews; politicians wanted to be seen with him.

He turned them all down.

"I was really pushing him to do Oprah," says Minneapolis friend Mark Emery. "He could have really helped people. He could have changed people. But I know that's not really what he wants to do. He's happy to change himself."

The last thing Cutshall wanted was for his story to be appropriated by the self-help industry, to become yet another simple answer to complex questions. He didn't want to become a mascot, a peddler of false hope. He knew that hard questions have hard answers.

"I think people who have a problem, whether it's being overweight, or wearing women's underwear, or whatever, want easy fixes for everything," Cutshall says. "The only reason this worked is because I realized no one could fix it but me." By the end of 2007, Cutshall had biked another 4,083 miles and his total weight loss stood at 259 pounds, putting him at 242 pounds. He and his family loved so much about Minnesota. On a snowy February day in 2008, though, he sat at Cars-R-Coffins, feeling content, when Everstone asked him what he was smiling about.

"Winter's almost over," he said.

Everstone looked at him. "Sorry, but winter's only half over."

Cutshall did the math: six months of real winter. To keep riding every single day for the rest of his life, he needed to leave. So in October 2008, before the snow came, and weighing a mere 184 pounds, Cutshall put new tires on the family car (the old ones had rotted from disuse) and took his wife and daughter west to the promised biking land of Portland, Oregon. By the end of that year, Cutshall had logged another 6,938 miles on his blue and white bike, and there were only 185 pounds of him left, including 25 to 30 pounds of loose skin hanging from his frame.

The family found a place on the south side of town, not far from the Willamette River, and just a few blocks from a bike trail. Their life settled into a pleasant rhythm.

Amy works while Cutshall home schools Chloe. Together they run errands on their cargo bike. Then at night, Cutshall takes his Bob Brown bike out to the road. He rides as hard and long as he can, then he does one more mile.

After his ride, he comes inside to shower, and sometimes he'll stare in the mirror for a while. The face there is still so new it takes him a moment to recognize it as his own.

Cutshall can still remember barely being able to move, and yet last year, in 2009, he rode almost 20,000 miles, which is nothing compared with the distance between one life and the next, the gulf between being alive and actually living.

He looks for constants, for things that haven't changed, for truths. The eyes. Those haven't changed. He knows those eyes. There are his wife and daughter. There is their love, which has taken him so far. And there is his bike, which has taken him even farther.

"Everything I do," Cutshall says, "from the time I get out of bed, is a lead-up to being on the bike. I'm connected to it, big time. It's not love, but it's huge. I wouldn't be here without it. That bike is a piece of me."

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